Henry Ford was a man obsessed with eschewing the status quo, one driven to continually improve any product or process he could. Aware of the limitations of steel as a building material for automobiles, Ford began research into alternate materials, such as plastic. Equally aware of the complexity of converting ore into steel, Ford once sought a better way to make cars by using the lowly soybean as a building block for body panels. Though much of the car remains shrouded in mystery, the result of those experiments is forever known as the Ford Soybean Car.

Its roots can be traced back to a visit that Ford made to his Deerfield Village Trade School. It was there that Ford found a book on the soybean, then a virtually unknown (and financially insignificant) crop in the United States. Fascinated by the plant’s untapped potential, Ford became obsessed with soybean-based food products, serving foods like soybean cheese, soy bread, soy butter, soy milk and soy ice cream to media guests at the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair. Ford also became focused on building a car that came (partially) from the ground, in the form of renewable crops.

Lowell Overly drives the Soybean Car.

The task of designing such a car originally fell to E.T. Gregorie, but Ford was reportedly dissatisfied with the work on the project produced by the stylist and his team. Instead, it was handed off to Lowell E. Overly, whose background prior to working in Ford’s Soybean Laboratory was as a tool and die designer. Overly sought the assistance of chemist Robert A. Boyer, and the net result was a car that utilized a tubular steel frame to support a total of fourteen body panels, allegedly made of a plastic derived from soybeans. To save weight, acrylic sheets were used for windows in lieu of glass, and a 60hp flathead Ford V-8 provided propulsion. The finished product weighed less than 2,000 pounds, a weight reduction of 25 percent compared to conventional (and comparably-sized) cars of the day.

Ford first showed the Soybean Car at Dearborn Days in August of 1941, and then later at the Michigan State Fair. Despite its extraordinary origin and materials, the car hardly appeared futuristic; from a distance, it was conservative in its styling, almost to a fault. The most controversial aspect of the car, however, was likely the composition of its quarter-inch-thick plastic body panels, details of which were never fully revealed to the public. One source claimed the panels were a complex blend of soybeans, wheat, hemp, flax and ramie, but Overly himself disputed this. By his recollection, the panels were a blend of soybean fiber, phenolic resin and formaldehyde, which would make them similar in architecture (if not materials) to the Duroplast panels later used on the East German Trabant (composed of cotton fibers and phenol resin).

The steel frame of the Soybean Car. Fourteen body panels mounted to this frame.

One would think that reconstructing the plastic panels would be as simple as checking the engineering notes for the project, but no record of the formula used to create the panels exists today. Materials analysis could be performed on the car itself, but it, too, has been lost to time, reportedly destroyed by E.T. Gregorie shortly after the car’s appearance at the Michigan State Fair. A second car was said to be under construction, but the onset of World War II put an end to any further development of civilian vehicles. Like the original car, any trace of this second Soybean Car has been lost to history.

Conspiracy theorists are quick to point out that success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan. Had the Soybean Car been the miraculous conveyance that Henry Ford once promised, it’s unlikely that the composition of its body panels would have been lost to history. Given that modern materials science has still yet to produce a plastic durable enough for automotive body panels from soybeans, it hardly seems likely that Ford’s Soybean Laboratory staff was able to do so more than seven decades back. Still, the car was significant in that it was the first American vehicle to wear a plastic body, and it used a construction method not dissimilar to that employed by General Motors on the Pontiac Fiero in 1983.

Producing the car’s body panels.

Ford’s reasons for pursuing a soybean-based car were noble enough as well. Such a vehicle would have blended agriculture with industry, supporting both farming and manufacturing; the resiliency of its plastic panels (and the strength of its steel frame tubing) could have yielded a safer automobile; and a shortage of metal could have meant an interrupted supply of automobiles (or an increase in pricing) even without the onset of World War II. In an alternate reality, perhaps the Soybean Car could have been a success, lowering the price of the automobile to the point where not owning one was seen as folly.

Was the Soybean Car nothing more than smoke and mirrors, or was Ford at the beginning of a new era that simply needed more time (and hence, more money) to see to fruition? Ford had reportedly invested millions of dollars into the development of the soybean car, and by the time research into development could have recommenced, the country was more focused on a return to normalcy than it was on the development of a plastic-bodied car produced from crops.

Still, the precise answer to that question will likely remain as elusive as the formula to transmute lead into gold, or soybeans into a durable polymer.

35 Responses to “Cars of Futures Past – Ford’s “Soybean Car””

The 50′s – ’60′s Israeli car ‘Susita’ was also structured of a duraplast type of material.
Am not certain of whether soy or other plants were incorporated in it, but rumors abounded that the body panels were favorite snacks of hungry camels …., Rumors that were never confirmed.

Sounds to me like the car was misnamed. Should have been phenolic resin car, not soybean car. It makes sense that phenolic resin, or Bakelite, was the plastic used, as it was the highest tech plastic around in the late 30′s and early 40′s. Bakelite is what phones, distributor caps, ash trays, some jewelry, etc., were made out of back then. The soybean fibers were only used to give the phenolic resin panels more strength at less weight. Saw dust could have been used instead. I doubt the technology to actually polymerize protein from soybeans existed at that time.

Attended a week long class quite awhile ago with a gentleman that worked in the chemistry lab at Ford when Henry I was still around. He said Henry brought them a bushel of leaves one time and asked what they could get from them. He said you did not give any cute answers to Henry. They analyzed the leaves, reported to Henry, and said nothing could be extracted that was economically feasible. That was what Henry needed to know.

Generally, I prefer cars of the 50′s, but the single piece windshield, and clean ‘European’ lines, make the ‘soybean’ car uniquely appealing. Other cars of the era, like the 1940 Lincoln Continental also sported single piece windshields, but the ‘soybean’ car’s CURVED single piece may have been predictive of the future.

Regarding the ‘soybean’ moniker. People also called Howard Hughes’ flying boat’ the ‘spruce goose’ despite the fact that the plane was built almost entirely of birch, not pine. For want of a better term, it’s ‘associative tagging.’

My grandfather, a farmer, talked fairly often about Henry Ford’s work with soybeans-something which has come to be a very important crop. My grandfather also liked to talk about the steering wheel made of soybeans, in the Ford of one of his cousins. One hot day it melted away in a puddle, or so the story goes.

Henry Ford was a brilliant man, of insight and foresight, unequaled in his day or any other! Ford had little or no education (indoctrination in today’s vernacular)! Someone asked Ford, “what is your opinion of high school grads (equal to Harvard PH’D's) of today, Ford answered, “problem is, they come out of schools and colleges, thinking if they don’t think of it, it isn’t worth thinking about”! Doggone insightful if you ask me!

when you printed that in 1900 people worked on hybrid electric/diesel seem like this and other good ideas get put in the back room and lost. Ford and Edison wintered in fort myers FL their lab worked with lots of plants so this seem possible.

I’ve always found it quite humorous that the inspiration for building the Corvette was the result of Henry Fords’ experimenting. He certainly was a genius. And I’ve owned 30 Corvettes. He even had sense enough to have put a V8 in the first one,….but then, it took the Ford Thunderbird to convince GM to do it.

First time I saw this picture, I immediately thought of the Volvo 122 series (The Amazon), and since the early PV Volvos looked like a ’48 Ford, I wonder if their designers got ahold of old Ford Archives?